Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond, European and American paintings and sculptures 1870–1970 in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra: Australian National Gallery 1992, pp. 248–249, illus., as ‘Brown, black on maroon’;

An introduction to the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia 1992, p. 68 , illus. col.;

No. 20 (Deep red and black) 1957 is a canvas that is characteristic of Rothko’s mature style, composed of soft‑edged blocks of colour that float above each other. Throughout the early 1950s he employed bright colours—reds, yellow, oranges and blues—in harmonious combinations. But, in 1957, the year this work was painted, a perceptible shift occurred in Rothko's paintings. Fewer and darker colours were used, giving a sombre expression to his work. Rothko was still painting ‘dramas’, a term he had used to describe the subject of his paintings of the 1940s, using colour as the ‘instrument’: ‘I exclude no emotion from being actual and therefore pertinent’, he said in 1957. ‘I take the liberty to play on any string of my existence. I might as an artist, be lyrical, grim, maudlin, humorous, tragic.’[1]

At that time, however, Rothko's paintings reflected a more limited range of mood: among the ‘ingredients’ of his art, which he listed in a lecture he delivered at the Pratt Institute in 1958, was ‘a clear preoccupation with death. All art deals with intimations of mortality’.[2] To Dore Ashton, a regular visitor to his studio at this time, Rothko claimed that ‘he was creating the most violent painting in America’.[3] Ashton interpreted this as referring to the conflict inherent in the association of colours that Rothko conceived of as the symbolic equivalents of emotions. As Rothko believed, ‘a painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience’.[4] The ‘dark’ emotions that permeate No. 20 (Deep red and black), and other paintings of 1957, were, with certain exceptions, the basis for all the works that Rothko painted until he killed himself, a little over a decade later.

Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond, European and American paintings and sculptures 1870–1970 in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra: Australian National Gallery 1992, p. 250, revised Steven Tonkin 2003

[2]Taken from Rothko’s notes for a lecture given in 1958 at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and published by Dore Ashton in The New York Times,31 October 1958, reprinted in The New York School, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1965, p. 142.